Research Impact in Visual and Performing Arts: Addressing Challenges and Developing Best Practices for Faculty Tenure and Promotion

This case study describes how Syracuse University Libraries’ Research Impact Team (RIT) expanded its services to support a performing arts faculty member for the first time. Working with an Associate Professor in the Drama Department in the College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) preparing for promotion to Full Professor, the team recognized early on that traditional research impact practices would need to be reimagined, because creative, performance-based scholarship is often ephemeral, time-based, and poorly served by conventional academic metrics systems. Over the course of a year, the team met monthly to develop a range of tailored supports and deliverables, including a media mentions report, programmatic comparisons with peer institutions, campus resource referrals, and four original data visualizations illustrating the faculty member’s teaching impact and global reach. The experience revealed significant gaps in existing tools and institutional frameworks for evaluating creative scholarship and is now informing new RIT guidelines and shared resources to support an anticipated influx of VPA promotion cases in the coming years.